The new Waterstones Children's Laureate Chris Riddell says parents and
children should draw together, as a bonding experience

As I speak to the illustrator, writer and political cartoonist Chris Riddell – who has just been appointed the ninth Waterstones Children's Laureate – he is drawing, on a press release, a picture of himself drawing on a press release.

“Very meta, isn’t it?” he remarks.

He is living up to his own suggestion that everyone "draw every day" – not meant as a finger-wagging injunction, he says. He doesn’t want to create another thing for parents to feel guilty about, or detract from time spent sharing books. "It’s more: 'have you tried it?'" He thinks drawing together, like reading together, is a bonding experience. "My sketchbook is not sacrosanct and my children" – he has three – "would draw on one page while I drew on the other. It was something we shared."

Riddell, who is 53, has illustrated more than 150 books since his career began in the Eighties. He has won two Kate Greenaway medals for illustrating the words of others – for Pirate Diary by Richard Platt (2002) and Martin Jenkins's rendition of Gulliver (2004) – and he won the Costa Children's Book Award for his own Goth Girl, in which his delight in puns, gothic sensibility and relish for literary allusion reached a peak. His celebrated collaborations include three books with Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book and Fortunately the Milk were both best-sellers) and a fantasy pastiche series with Paul Stewart. He took the dismal text of Russell Brand’s retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and made it spectacular. A Great Big Cuddle: Poems for the Very Young, chosen by fellow Laureate Michael Rosen, is out in September.

Once a week, Riddell lampoons fat cats and political leaders with decorative opulence in The Literary Review and The Observer. "The Observer was the paper my father read," he says, before explaining that his entry into the field of political cartoons came from The Economist, though to this day he doesn’t know why. "I like to think the editor was reading my picturebooks to his children – The Trouble With Elephants was about that time – and he thought my way with large animals made me just the person to comment on the European Union." Riddell says he is "a man of firm opinions", but does not want to politicise the Laureateship. "I’m there to advocate writers and illustrators and the children’s books industry."

He has already begun a "Laureate’s Log", which will depict every day of his tenure for the next two years, and be shared on social media. His maxim is: "Wherever there are words let there be pictures". He will do a lot of live drawing as Laureate – and is phenomenal to watch. He draws with astonishing speed and precision, often elaborate caricatures or fantastical subjects; aliens and monsters are a speciality. And he wants to draw with other illustrators – "people who like nothing better than drawing" – so children can witness the enjoyment. Though Riddell’s skill is so great it might seem unattainable to others, his line is: "Don’t think about it, just do it." He wants to get across the idea that, as he puts it, "Everybody Can Draw.”

During his tenure, he plans to champion school libraries; he finds it "bizarre" that not every school is required to have one. Though he recognises resources are limited, he will "celebrate what we have, and want more", creating posters and resources to brighten what book spaces schools have, encouraging those with one shelf to have two, those with shelves to have a corner, those with a corner to have a room. "Every journey starts with a small step," he says.

Riddell was himself a bookish child, the happy middle one of five. Born in South Africa, he spent his infancy in East Yorkshire, Bristol and rural Worcestershire, where he had what he describes as "a Cider With Rosie childhood, running about in orchards". He spent his teens in Brixton (his father, a liberal Anglican vicar, became the Prison chaplain), and he bunked off rugby on Wednesday afternoons to go to the Tate, ‘hopping on and off buses’ and relishing the cultural melting pot of London. As a sixth former he befriended long-term inmates of the rather gothic Cane Hill psychiatric hospital in suburban Coulsdon, where his father later worked, and watched cricket from the roof of his school, which overlooked the Oval. His upbringing meant, he says now, that "I don’t feel uncomfortable in forbidding institutions, and work with, say, prisons or psychiatric institutions could be one of the things that evolve out of the Laureateship.”

He loved the language and music of religious services, though he is no longer a believer – which was fine with his family: "I have no guilt of any sort". He was, he says, "a terribly conformist and well-behaved child", for whom going to art school was "unimaginable rebellion – but no one minded".

Chris Riddell at the 2015 Hay Festival JAY WILLIAMS

He always loved books, and illustration was his way into that world. After a foundation course at Epsom he studied at Brighton under the inspiring Raymond Briggs. One day by chance Briggs introduced Riddell to the publisher Sebastian Walker who ‘ruffled my hair and said “would you like to illustrate a children’s book?”’. Sarah Hayes’ Book of Giants was published with his illustrations by Walker Books in conjunction with Sainsbury’s.

Riddell speaks with awe of his predecessors as Laureates (Quentin Blake, Anne Fine, Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Rosen, Anthony Browne, Julia Donaldson and Malorie Blackman); he has depicted them as Superheroes. Appreciating the ‘great big honour’ of joining their ranks, he feels ‘disappointingly not grand’ – but has given himself, in the persona of The Doodler, a ‘very small mask’, which he plans to carry with him.

He thinks this a "golden age" of illustration, citing Jim Kay bringing new life to Harry Potter, and seeing a return to illustration in books for older readers. Loving graphic novels ("brilliant work is being done"), he aspires to the "Herculean task" of making one when he next has "a spare five years". And he is not afraid of digitisation: "The computer is a tool, just like pencil or charcoal, allowing illustrators to manipulate images from their sketchbooks". Still, "drawing has to be at the heart of it. If you take away the human hand you end up with graphics, and that’s fine but it’s not what I think of as illustration." He believes we must "keep drawing alive". And all you need for that, he says, is "a notebook and a stub of a pencil".